From the Vault: Review of American Blood by John Nichols
Being the third installment of an occasional series wherein I dust off one of the reviews I supplied to the inventory file of a buddy's zine that never saw the light of day.
Don't have an exact date as to when I originally wrote this one; I suspect that it was sometime in 1994, give or take a year or two .
Don't feel much like writing a preamble for this one, so let's get on to the trivia portion of our program:
Bloody Nonsense: John Nichols's American Blood
NY: Ballantine Books; copyright 1987
(Paperback/370 pps)
The Vietnam War was (and, to a certain extent, continues to be) such a traumatic touchstone for the American psyche that the "crazed Vietnam vet" has become a calmly accepted cliché -- as if no one was ever psychically scarred by any other war, and Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran who blithely killed thirteen people in about as many minutes in 1949 in Camden, New Jersey, and, upon capture, announced, "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had enough bullets," never existed. There have been enough cinematic and literary meditations on Vietnam -- Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (turned into an eponymous 1989 movie with Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd), Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (the basis for Stanley Kubrick's 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket), Hal Ashby's 1978 Coming Home, Michael Cimino's 1978 The Deer Hunter, Oliver Stone's triptych of films (Platoon [1986], Born On the Fourth of July [1989], Heaven & Earth [1993]) -- to cause one to suppose that the the subject has been all but exhausted.
Staggering into a bookstore near you comes American Blood by John Nichols, an author who has had three of his novels turned into movies (The Sterile Cuckoo [1969], The Wizard of Loneliness [1988], and The Milagro Beanfield War [1988]). Nichols's basic premise -- that the atrocities committed by some Americans in Vietnam and the atrocities which some Americans inflict upon each other every day of the year are not unrelated -- is an idea Oliver Stone would surely love. (I'm a little mystified that he didn't use American Blood as the germ for Natural Born Killers -- or, at the very least, that he hasn't optioned the book's film rights.) American Blood's narrator/protagonist is Michael P. Smith, who is, we are given to understand, a basically decent sort and an underachiever in the old ultraviolence department: he commits just enough war crimes in 'Nam to get by with his fellow grunts. Much the same way that Hasford likened the Marine recruits to werewolves in Short-Timers, Nichols here repeatedly refers to the soldiers as golems (in Jewish legend, a golem is a large homunculus sculpted of clay and brought to life to protect and avenge the Jews of the Prague ghetto; Frankenstein's monster is a kind of Enlightenment updating of this legend). As Nichols uses the term, however, the protective aspects of the golem are deemphasized; Nichols is interested in the term "golem" solely to denote a mythical beast with a fantastic capacity for violence. Accordingly, the first chapter, highlighting Michael's experiences in Vietnam, is a grocery list of horrors that seem at least partially inspired by the sketches of Goya. The problem with this is that Michael is such a cypher, we feel nothing when he describes these events: no shock, no anger, no revulsion, no pity, nothing. He could be talking about working on his car instead of a group of human beings mercilessly torturing and killing each other. There's a right way and a wrong way to depict a character's detachment from traumatic events occurring around him. Graham Greene did it the right way in The Quiet American (a novel about Vietnam when it was still a "French problem"); Nichols here does it the wrong way.
Things don't improve much once Michael returns stateside. For a while he tries hanging with a fellow grunt from 'Nam, Thomas Carp, a brutal, gleeful sociopath whom Michael has ambivalent feelings for. Michael does the commune thing, the fight a group of rowdy teenagers for no good reason thing, the hang with a troubled, disaffected vet thing. Michael gets a job as a photographer with a local newspaper, and occasionally gets to cover car wrecks and drunken shootings; these assignments make his urge to indulge in golem-like violence all the stronger. (He gets to cover the death of his friend Willie, a luckless fellow vet.) He unsuccessfully stalks a phone company employee, Nicole, who has caught his eye. Finally, his restless, ill-defined desires fixate on Janine, a blowsy, wise-cracking, middle-aged sexpot waitress. After a lengthy courtship, Michael wins a date with her. On their first date -- a home-cooked meal at Janine's house -- Michael attempts to rape her; in the ensuing struggle, Janine does more damage to Michael than he inflicts upon her. To add insult to his injured male pride, Cathie -- Janine's rebellious, foul-mouthed, teenaged daughter -- returns home, discovers the house and her mother in shambles, and shoots Michael as he is cleaning himself off in the bathroom.
Here American Blood takes a turn from the indifferent to the unbelievable: fearing for her daughter's future, Janine agrees not to press charges against Michael if he agrees not to press charges against Cathie. Then, in order that Cathie may be "healed," Janine starts having Michael over for dinner -- with her daughter in attendance -- as soon as he's released from the hospital. Eventually the three become close; later on, Janine and Michael start sleeping together. Cathie is so vulgar and smart-assed, she makes Bart Simpson look like Greg Brady; that any parent would let their child get away with talking to them this way, and that a guy who has served in 'Nam, where he had to worry about booby-trapped kids and teenagers firing AK-47s at him, would calmly accept Cathie's behavior stretches the reader's credulity well past the breaking point. Scenes of these three happily playing basketball or camping in Michael's pick-up truck drag on interminably, until "America, hog-butcher to the world" (in Nichols's parlance), intervenes to shatter their happiness.
American Blood is a mess. It never adequately addresses either the Vietnam War or the issue of violence in America, and the writing ranges from the vapid to the preposterous: the erotic scenes with Michael and Janine are particularly dumb. (One mercifully brief sample: "In the dim light my love languished beneath me juicy.") Nichols offers hope to unwittingly farcical effect; the "renewal" offered in American Blood is reminiscent of the end of Monty Python's The Life of Brian, where rows upon rows of crucified people are singing "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life." What amazes me is the fact that American Blood garnered the good reviews that are excerpted on the book's covers and first page. To my mind, American Blood is unrealistic, phony, gaudy, and bright; it has as much relation to real blood as those tubes of red food coloring sold to kids for Halloween. If the trademark usage issues could get ironed out, American Blood should be retitled "American Vampire Blood."
-- Ron Dingman,
c. 1994
Don't have an exact date as to when I originally wrote this one; I suspect that it was sometime in 1994, give or take a year or two .
Don't feel much like writing a preamble for this one, so let's get on to the trivia portion of our program:
Bloody Nonsense: John Nichols's American Blood
NY: Ballantine Books; copyright 1987
(Paperback/370 pps)
The Vietnam War was (and, to a certain extent, continues to be) such a traumatic touchstone for the American psyche that the "crazed Vietnam vet" has become a calmly accepted cliché -- as if no one was ever psychically scarred by any other war, and Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran who blithely killed thirteen people in about as many minutes in 1949 in Camden, New Jersey, and, upon capture, announced, "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had enough bullets," never existed. There have been enough cinematic and literary meditations on Vietnam -- Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (turned into an eponymous 1989 movie with Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd), Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (the basis for Stanley Kubrick's 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket), Hal Ashby's 1978 Coming Home, Michael Cimino's 1978 The Deer Hunter, Oliver Stone's triptych of films (Platoon [1986], Born On the Fourth of July [1989], Heaven & Earth [1993]) -- to cause one to suppose that the the subject has been all but exhausted.
Staggering into a bookstore near you comes American Blood by John Nichols, an author who has had three of his novels turned into movies (The Sterile Cuckoo [1969], The Wizard of Loneliness [1988], and The Milagro Beanfield War [1988]). Nichols's basic premise -- that the atrocities committed by some Americans in Vietnam and the atrocities which some Americans inflict upon each other every day of the year are not unrelated -- is an idea Oliver Stone would surely love. (I'm a little mystified that he didn't use American Blood as the germ for Natural Born Killers -- or, at the very least, that he hasn't optioned the book's film rights.) American Blood's narrator/protagonist is Michael P. Smith, who is, we are given to understand, a basically decent sort and an underachiever in the old ultraviolence department: he commits just enough war crimes in 'Nam to get by with his fellow grunts. Much the same way that Hasford likened the Marine recruits to werewolves in Short-Timers, Nichols here repeatedly refers to the soldiers as golems (in Jewish legend, a golem is a large homunculus sculpted of clay and brought to life to protect and avenge the Jews of the Prague ghetto; Frankenstein's monster is a kind of Enlightenment updating of this legend). As Nichols uses the term, however, the protective aspects of the golem are deemphasized; Nichols is interested in the term "golem" solely to denote a mythical beast with a fantastic capacity for violence. Accordingly, the first chapter, highlighting Michael's experiences in Vietnam, is a grocery list of horrors that seem at least partially inspired by the sketches of Goya. The problem with this is that Michael is such a cypher, we feel nothing when he describes these events: no shock, no anger, no revulsion, no pity, nothing. He could be talking about working on his car instead of a group of human beings mercilessly torturing and killing each other. There's a right way and a wrong way to depict a character's detachment from traumatic events occurring around him. Graham Greene did it the right way in The Quiet American (a novel about Vietnam when it was still a "French problem"); Nichols here does it the wrong way.
Things don't improve much once Michael returns stateside. For a while he tries hanging with a fellow grunt from 'Nam, Thomas Carp, a brutal, gleeful sociopath whom Michael has ambivalent feelings for. Michael does the commune thing, the fight a group of rowdy teenagers for no good reason thing, the hang with a troubled, disaffected vet thing. Michael gets a job as a photographer with a local newspaper, and occasionally gets to cover car wrecks and drunken shootings; these assignments make his urge to indulge in golem-like violence all the stronger. (He gets to cover the death of his friend Willie, a luckless fellow vet.) He unsuccessfully stalks a phone company employee, Nicole, who has caught his eye. Finally, his restless, ill-defined desires fixate on Janine, a blowsy, wise-cracking, middle-aged sexpot waitress. After a lengthy courtship, Michael wins a date with her. On their first date -- a home-cooked meal at Janine's house -- Michael attempts to rape her; in the ensuing struggle, Janine does more damage to Michael than he inflicts upon her. To add insult to his injured male pride, Cathie -- Janine's rebellious, foul-mouthed, teenaged daughter -- returns home, discovers the house and her mother in shambles, and shoots Michael as he is cleaning himself off in the bathroom.
Here American Blood takes a turn from the indifferent to the unbelievable: fearing for her daughter's future, Janine agrees not to press charges against Michael if he agrees not to press charges against Cathie. Then, in order that Cathie may be "healed," Janine starts having Michael over for dinner -- with her daughter in attendance -- as soon as he's released from the hospital. Eventually the three become close; later on, Janine and Michael start sleeping together. Cathie is so vulgar and smart-assed, she makes Bart Simpson look like Greg Brady; that any parent would let their child get away with talking to them this way, and that a guy who has served in 'Nam, where he had to worry about booby-trapped kids and teenagers firing AK-47s at him, would calmly accept Cathie's behavior stretches the reader's credulity well past the breaking point. Scenes of these three happily playing basketball or camping in Michael's pick-up truck drag on interminably, until "America, hog-butcher to the world" (in Nichols's parlance), intervenes to shatter their happiness.
American Blood is a mess. It never adequately addresses either the Vietnam War or the issue of violence in America, and the writing ranges from the vapid to the preposterous: the erotic scenes with Michael and Janine are particularly dumb. (One mercifully brief sample: "In the dim light my love languished beneath me juicy.") Nichols offers hope to unwittingly farcical effect; the "renewal" offered in American Blood is reminiscent of the end of Monty Python's The Life of Brian, where rows upon rows of crucified people are singing "Always Look On the Bright Side of Life." What amazes me is the fact that American Blood garnered the good reviews that are excerpted on the book's covers and first page. To my mind, American Blood is unrealistic, phony, gaudy, and bright; it has as much relation to real blood as those tubes of red food coloring sold to kids for Halloween. If the trademark usage issues could get ironed out, American Blood should be retitled "American Vampire Blood."
-- Ron Dingman,
c. 1994